Introduction to Instance Groups

Instance groups are sets of VMs that are managed as a single entity. Any gcloud or console command applied to an instance group is applied to all members of the instance group. Google provides two types of instance groups: managed and unmanaged.

Managed groups consist of groups of identical VMs. They are created using an instance template, which is a specification of a VM configuration, including machine type, boot disk image, zone, labels, and other properties of an instance. Managed instance groups can automatically scale the number of instances in a group and be used with load balancing to distribute workloads across the instance group. If an instance in a group crashes, it will be recreated automatically. Managed groups are the preferred type of instance group.

Unmanaged groups should be used only when you need to work with different configurations within different VMs within the group.

Creating and Removing Instance Groups and Templates

To create...